Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

When it is negative he gets penalised if it is 3%. Here is my question. The Department does the map and sends out a reference area. It decides that a certain area of heather is grand and it measures 20 hectares. Then the inspector comes out and decides that it is marginally too high and too woody and he takes it out. The farmer winds up with a 20% error rate and that is the end of the grant for the whole year. I think this uncertainty worries farmers because it is very difficult to say exactly say what is the magic height of heather, when it stops being grazable and starts being woody. I think farmers should be given an assurance on a year-to-year basis that the reference area would be accepted as being acceptable. If the inspector thinks it is marginally too high, then it is corrected for the following year. The uncertainty factor is the big problem here. Farmers actually accept an ineligible feature being taken out when they put in the application in good faith and they have accepted the Department's judgment from the sky. The land is accepted as eligible but then an inspector comes out and decides that it is marginally too high. That is what happened in Slieve Aughty. That is when the lid blows off this. That issue needs to be dealt with.

The year 2013 was a salutary lesson. Every farmer thought that once they got the map out every year that these would be inspected and passed and everything was more or less hunky-dory. None of them thought they were ever going to lose payments back over five years as a result. I always think there is a massive difference between a genuine error or a judgment call error and intentional fraud. Taking away a guy's livelihood for an unintentional error because one guy says the heather is high and another says it is low, that is an awful frigging penalty. If this happened in the PAYE sector they would be bloody marching down O'Connell Street.